Make 'Em Laugh
by acaelousqueadcentrum
Summary: Holly gets visitors at work. Part of "Heart to Heart." Post-"This Is The Time to Remember."


When she heard her cellphone begin to vibrate, Holly breathed a sigh of relief. So far her morning had been full of paperwork, putting together autopsy reports and signing off on them. The incoming call would be a welcome distraction.

She reached over to grab her phone and smiled when she saw her wife's name on the screen.

"Hey, hun," Holly said, "what's up?"

"Just calling to see how your day's going," Gail answered. "Still playing catch-up with paperwork?"

The doctor sighed, there really was quite a backlog. Of course, that tended to happen when one took four weeks of family medical leave to care for a wife who almost died giving birth and then twelve weeks of maternity leave to bond with their new baby. The city had spread her work around, and even brought in another forensic pathologist when the lab got really busy, but Holly was still responsible for reviewing the paperwork and signing off on it. She'd been back at work for just a few weeks now and had been coming in an hour early and staying an hour late every day just to get it under control.

Thankfully, the end was in sight.

Not quite within reach, but within sight, at least.

She heard Gail laugh. "I'm going to take that as a yes," her wife said.

"I think Randy comes in and adds more paper to the bottom of the stack when I step out of the office," Holly joked, "because every time I come back in, the pile seems to be bigger."

"Oh, poor Lunchbox," Gail teased, "you sound like you could use a break. What would you say to a lunch date with your two favorite people in the world."

Holly laughed before responding. "Well," she said, "we'd have to keep it quiet. My wife's a police officer, you know."

"Oh, har, har," the doctor heard Gail say but the tone of her voice had changed. It sounded closer, no longer electronic.

Turning her chair toward the door, Holly's face lit up. Standing in the doorway, with a diaper bag over one shoulder and their beautiful boy Hugo strapped to her chest, was Gail.

Holly rose from her desk. "Hey," she said, "what are you two doing here?"

She dropped a kiss onto Gail's cheek, and then another on the crown of her son's head, ruffling his wild blonde locks as he grabbed for the lapel of her lab coat with chubby fists.

"You've been spending a lot of time here lately, wife," Gail replied with a wry grin. "You're getting as pale as me. So the boy and I thought we'd come and tempt you out into the sunshine for lunch."

The blonde looked deeply into Holly's soft brown eyes before reaching up to pull her wife's head down for another kiss.

"So, Doctor," Gail asked as they parted, "can you come out and play for a bit?"

Holly smiled and took off her lab coat, tossing it onto the couch in the corner of her office. "Let's go," she said, wrapping an arm around Gail's shoulder, Hugo babbling loudly.

They got sandwiches and drinks from the deli across the street and then walked to a small park about a block away from the lab. It was a gorgeous July afternoon. The sun was warm on their faces, and the flowers in the park were in full bloom. Holly pulled a blanket out of the diaper bag, and then helped Gail to sit before joining her wife and son on the ground.

It had been almost six months since those terrible days in the hospital, and Gail was mostly recovered. But the memories of what had happened were still fresh, and Holly found herself struggling to stop asking how her wife was feeling all the time. With wanting to do things for Gail that the blonde was fully capable of doing on her own.

She was getting better at it, for the most part. And Gail was getting better at not being too stubborn to let her help sometimes. For someone who used to object to having to do any sort of work or activity at all, weeks of forced inactivity had turned Gail into someone who was very insistent on not letting other people do things for her, things that she could do, anyway.

But with Hugo in the BabyBjorn, she was perfectly willing to take Holly's arm as she lowered herself to the ground.

On the blanket they take Hugo out of his sling and let him practice sitting up on his own, something he can do for a few minutes at a time now, while they slowly eat their sandwiches. And then Gail gathers him up to sit in her lap while Holly feeds him pureed carrots from a jar. They've been slowly introducing him to solid foods, and carrots are one of his favorites.

"Here, Hugo," Holly says, gently touching the spoon to his lips as his attention slips away from his lunch, "or are you full, big guy?"

They clean him up and Holly goes to throw away their garbage. And then they sit on the blanket and just watch as their son lays on his tummy and struggles to roll over. It should happen any day now, Gail's mother had said when she saw him on the weekend. But today doesn't look like the day.

But that's okay, because Gail and Hugo have another trick up their sleeve.

"Hey Hugo," Gail says, smiling when her son turns his head toward her, "should we show mama what we discovered this morning?"

Holly looks over at her wife, not sure what to expect. Gail moves a little closer, and then sits Hugo up again.

"Are you ready, mama," she says, looking over to her wife with a big grin.

Holly still isn't sure what Gail and their son are going to do, but she's definitely ready to find out.

"Absolutely," she replies.

Gail just holds out a single finger in front of the boy's face, and then slowly, slowly, taps him on the nose, saying "boop" and making a silly face at him. And then she does it again. And then once more.

With the third tap on the nose, their little Hugo lets out a deep, throaty laugh.

Holly looks on in awe, her baby is laughing. Giggling, actually. And the more Gail laughs, the more he laughs.

"So, mama," Gail says as she plays with Hugo's tiny sock-covered feet, "you want to give it a try?"

Holly looks at her smiling family. Damn straight she does.

So she scoots in a little closer and then ever so gently touches her finger to Hugo's cute little nose, the nose he clearly inherited from his mom.

"Boop," she says as she laughs, setting off another round of giggles in the little boy.

The sound settles into her heart, in the deepest and darkest corners. And Holly knows that on the bad days, on the dark days, she'll have the sound of her son's laugh to lighten her load.


End file.
